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Do we like Alibaba?

Chinese e-commerce and cloud giant (Taobao, Tmall, AliExpress, Alibaba Cloud), based in Hangzhou, China.

Our score: 4 out of 10. Not yet. Big fines in China and the EU, a Pentagon blacklisting and an AI-access accusation outweigh some real climate progress, so we'd hold back for now.

Alibaba was founded in 1999 by 18 people led by Jack Ma, a former English teacher from Hangzhou. Today Joe Tsai is chairman and co-founder Eddie Wu is CEO. Both took over in September 2023, when Daniel Zhang stepped aside. Wu has been steering the company hard towards AI and cloud.

The big old scandal: in April 2021 China's market regulator fined Alibaba 18.2 billion yuan (about $2.8bn) for forcing merchants to pick it over rivals, the 'choose one of two' policy. Alibaba accepted the fine. In 2024 the regulator said it had finished its three-year clean-up. Alibaba also paid $433.5m to settle a US shareholder suit, without admitting the claims had merit.

2026 has been rough. In July, Bloomberg reported the EU fined AliExpress a record €550m under its Digital Services Act. The Commission said AliExpress failed to properly assess unsafe or counterfeit products on its platform. The Pentagon also labelled Alibaba a 'Chinese military company'. Alibaba denies this and is suing.

Then there's AI. Bloomberg reported in June that Anthropic accused Alibaba of using thousands of fraudulent accounts to access its Claude model. A shareholder class action followed. Those are allegations, not findings. On the plus side, Alibaba says it's cutting its own emissions and aims for carbon neutrality in its operations by 2030. Overall, we'd say mixed-to-leaning-bad.

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Our take, from what the sources we read say on the day we checked. It can miss things; tap a source to read it.